BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

I guess I have a bit of a problem with this. Maybe it’s just a hangover from the end of Lulu 3 but I tend to view idle meddling in an ongoing dynasty to be more often malign than not; the use cases in this dynasty are a good example for the proposal but it could equally be the case that, say, a slow dynasty keeps getting peppered by “wrap it up” CfJs from idle players, and that could become extremely annoying. It also seems likely that idle players will start using CfJs as proposals that they can actually carry out, especially for core and appendix changes; that might not be bad in effect but should be explicit.

On a practical note, it is possible for a CfJ under this proposal to be both enactable and failable (if it has zero votes cast on it it will be unpopular, meeting this ‘has been open for voting for at least 48 hours and it is not Popular’ criterion, as well as meeting the new criterion for enactability).

I noticed the “both enactable and failable” thing but don’t think it’s a problem – in that situation, the resolving admin could easily add a FOR or AGAINST vote before enacting or failing respectively.

The potential for idle players to make nuisance CFJs is something I hadn’t considered; I was, perhaps naively, not expecting it to be a problem, especially as nuisance posts tend to be voted down. (That said, if there are a lot of idle players who are trying to move things onto the next dynasty, that does indicate a problem with the dynasty that the non-idle players should be aware of.)

Not necessarily, sadly; Lulu 3 is an example of a dynasty where idle players forced a resolution essentially out of spite (the players were engaged with a negotiation over a chop; idle players unidled en masse and forced the game into a metadynasty).

That said, they can do that under the status quo, so who knows.

I think enacting admins tend to like clearer guidance over what they should do - remmeber also that enacting admins can themselves be idle.

Thinking about it, if idle players are going to interfere, it is probably less of an issue if they do it via idle CFJ than if they unidle to do it – in the latter case they get to vote on the resulting interference proposals/CFJs, in the former case the nuisance CFJs can be voted down by the active players.

Unless the idle players outnumber the active ones (and I mean the truly active, not just “in the active list”).

These amendments seem technically useful, but I’d share the concerns about them altering the circle of the game.

A CfJ that asserts that some fundamental core rule might be broken or that the dynasty should be abandoned with no winner can disrupt the dynastic game, discouraging some players (particularly the less confident ones) from taking further action until the CfJ resolves. An active player will have a good sense of the appropriate time to raise that kind of CfJ. An idle player less so; they might be inadvertently dropping it into the middle of some tense or carefully-timed dynastic gameplay.

Although “abandon the dynasty” CfJs won’t get any votes from players who stay idle, allowing the idle creation of such CfJs does give a new point for those attitudes to crystallise around. (Lulu 3 saw idle players joining to support a proposal from an active player, rather than an idle player initiating it.)

from me but my heart isn’t in it.

Thanks for the feedback, everyone.

My understanding of the issue is basically one of “friction for idle players to interfere with the dynasty”. If a player is idle, has been for a while, and isn’t planning to participate in the dynasty, then there is nothing in the current ruleset stopping them from unidling to post a “this dynasty is boring, let’s go to a new one” proposal or CFJ”, other than social pressure. But normally, players don’t do that in practice.

Meanwhile, if a player is planning to participate in the dynasty but is idle, then this raises the chance that they may have technical problems unidling (e.g. something wrong with their dynastic variables, or an idle → unidle timeout that was created by mistake; for example, in Coppro II, Bucky idled out by accident during the endgame due to making only GNDT edits rather than posts or comments, and was unable to unidle due to this creating a timeout on unidling). So, this sort of “technically idle, but in practice idle” player might badly need to be able to make a CFJ (although at present they can usually persuade a non-idle player to do it on their behalf).

If this proposal were passed, then this would be helpful for “actively participating but idle players” who are invested in the dynasty; and the only extra ability it gives to uninvested idle players is that it would let them interfere without increasing quorum or having a vote available (which makes the interference less powerful). So the only downside is in terms of social pressure / social friction; an uninvested idle player might not want to take the drastic step of unidling just to post an “end the dynasty” CFJ (without participating in the dynastic gameplay) due to how upset it would make everyone else, but might nonetheless be willing to post such a CFJ while idle (even though their vote on it wouldn’t count) because doing so is in a sense less disruptive.

In other words, the proposal is technically an improvement, but fails at setting expectations correctly. Perhaps the correct solution is along the lines of a Fair Play rule (but maybe one that gives slightly more leeway than Fair Play rules currently do) that explains the extent to which interference by players who are uninvested in the dynasty is desirable or undesirable. (But we might first have to decide what our expectations for that are!)

I’ll leave this proposal open for now, but do sympathise with Josh’s and Kevan’s concerns, and may withdraw it if it looks like the vote will be close.

Maybe we need a special sub-category of CfJ purpose-built for this scenario, if this is truly the only scenario that would otherwise require idle players to participate. Basically, a “CfJ to make it possible to unidle a player” with no other purpose allowed. It’s subjective, sure, but I think there could be something around stating that this “special” CfJ requires at least one instruction to unidle an idle player.

Could it be abused? Sure, but then that ties into Fair Play.

[ais] The downside isn’t just “end the dynasty” CfJs, it’s also (and probably moreso) the “obscure fix” ones, where an idle player cares about something more than the active players do, but isn’t playing the dynasty so doesn’t consider how it might affect people’s strategies or that day’s events.

And the big philosophical “so possibly the game has zero players right now due to a misenacted proposal in 2007, what do we think about that” CfJs definitely have the potential to stall or derail a fragile dynasty.

It would be an incredibly bad idea to do an “obscure fix” CFJ while idle – generally speaking you want those to work under as many old rulesets as possible. (If the game did have no players right now due to a misenacted proposal in 2007, we’d need the CFJ to work under the rules from 2007!)

In any case, withdrawing this – there are enough people uncomfortable with this (including me, to some extent) that the issue probably needs more thought before changing the core rules.